ose arms she had stood such a little while ago by the old dial
of Damory Court was the son of the man who had killed him! She lifted
her hands to her breast with a gesture of anguish, then dropped to her
knees, buried her face on the dusty seat of one of the rickety horsehair
chairs and broke into a wild burst of sobs, noiseless but terrible, that
seemed to rise in her heart and tear themselves up through her breast.

"Oh, God," she whispered, "just when I was so happy! Oh, mother, mother!
You loved him, and your heart broke when he died. It was Valiant who
broke it--Valiant--Valiant. His father!"

She slipped down upon the bare floor and crouched there shuddering and
agonized, her disheveled hair wet with her tears. Was her love to be but
the thing of an hour, a single clasp--and then, forever, nothing? His
father's deed was not his fault. Yet how could she love a man whose
every feature brought a pang to that mother she loved more than
herself? So, over and over, the wheel of her thought turned in the same
desolate groove, and over and over the paroxysms of grief and longing
submerged her.

Dawn was paling the guttering candle and streaking the sky outside
before she composed herself. She rose heavily, as white as a narcissus
flower, winding back her hair from her quivering face, and struggling to
repress the tearless sobs that still caught stranglingly at her breath.
The gray infiltrating light seemed gaunt and cruel, and the thin
cheeping of waking sparrows on the lawn came to her with a haunting
intolerable note of pain.

Noiselessly as she had descended, she crept again up the stair. As she
passed her mother's door, she paused a moment, and laying her arms out
across it, pressed her lips to the dark grain of the wood.

CHAPTER XL

THE AWAKENING

The sun had passed the meridian next day when Valiant awoke, from a
sleep as deep as Abou ben Adhem's, yet one crowded with flying tiptoe
dreams. Inchoate and of such flimsy material that the first whiff of
reality dissipated them like smoke, these nevertheless left behind them
a fragrance, a sensation of golden sweetness and delight. The one great
fact of Shirley's love had lain at the core of all these honied images,
and his mind was full of it as his eyes opened, wide all at once, to the
new day.

He looked at his watch and rolled from the bed with a laugh. "Past
twelve!" he exclaimed. "Good heavens! What about all the work I had laid
out for to-day?"